Friday

Jul.
31, 1998

For the Life of Him and Her

Today's Reading: "For the Life of Him and Her" by Reed
Whittemore from THE PAST, THE PRESENT, THE FUTURE, published by
University of Arkansas Press (1990).

It's the feast day of ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, who in the 1530s
founded the Society of Jesus  the Jesuits.

The MELVILLE MARATHON gets underway at noon today in the coastal
town of Mystic, Connecticut. It's a 24-hour reading of Herman Melville's
Moby Dick on the decks of the old whaling ship, Charles W. Morgan. It's
held every year in honor of Melville's birthday, which is tomorrow.

It's the birthday in London, 1929, of writer
LYNNE REID
BANKS, the author of The Indian in the
Cupboard (1980) which recently came out in a film version, and
dozens of other books and plays, many of them for young readers. Her
first novel came out in 1960, The L-Shaped Room, which began a trilogy
about Jane Graham, a young single mother; the others are The Backward
Shadow, and Two is Lonely, written in the 1970s.

It's the birthday in Turin, 1919, of the Italian chemist and writer,
PRIMO LEVI (PREE-mo
LAY-vee) author of If This Is a Man, his first-person account of
surviving Auschwitz. During WWII Levi was in the Italian Resistance and
was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, but wasn't killed
because he was a chemist. After the war, Levi managed a Turin paint and
synthetic resin
factory, while writing more memoirs, poems, and novels. His best-known
book came out in 1975, called The Periodic Table; 21 essays, discussing
each of the elements  Argon through Zinc  which then served
as a springboard for Levi's reflections on morality, history, or
Auschwitz.

It's the birthday of SEBASTIAN SPERING KRESGE, who founded KRESGE'S
discount and variety stores  born this day in Bald Mount,
Pennsylvania, 1867. He was a traveling salesman before he opened up a
couple of stores in Memphis and Detroit in the 1890s, where everything
sold for under a dime. He said, "Hard work and the Bible can bring
any youngster to that glorious sunset of success."

It was on this day in 1703 that the English writer DANIEL DEFOE was
made to stand in pillory for writing a satirical, anti-church and
anti-government pamphlet called "The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters." He served another 15 months in prison, and when he
got out his business had crumbled, so he turned to writing, turning out
Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Moll Flanders three years later.

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